Category Archives: international

New rekonq release (2.4.2) ready just 1 day after another (2.4.1). Ehi, don’t get used to this :)
The motivation for this fast update is an idea came out from a bugzilla discussion for an old request: the clear urlbar button.

Here we are again, after a tiny pause, ready for a new release! Rekonq 2.4.0 has been released to the wild! What’s new in this release?
Here is a short summary of the most interesting things:Continue reading →

Voilà, rekonq 2.3.2 has been released to publish last fixes for the 2.3.1 fixes :)
Well… it shouldn’t, but it happens sometimes, you (may) know. You find a fix for a bug, you happily test it (I did it for 2 days in my local installation), when you are satisfied, you go and merge… the wrong branch! (The one with the fix + one stupid change you did to try something…). Moreover, in my local installation there was the right patch and I removed the testing branches after merge…

So, long story short. 2.3.2 is 2.3.1 working well. To know about changes from 2.3.0, please refer to 2.3.1 release blog.
And enjoy.

Short note today (as usual) announcing the immediate availability of rekonq 2.3.1. Rekonq is a web browser based on KDE and webkit focusing on being “light” and “fast”, given anyone gives to these words its own meaning ;)
This release just focuses on bugfixing: first hint I had to add about is about qtwebkit version. In this “strange” period, where qt focuses on Qt5, QML and WebKit2, while we are still bound to Qt4 && Webkit1, I think we need to follow the unofficial QtWebKit 2.3.x branch, with its releases about (last should be QtWebKit 2.3.1). People reported, in this 40 days since rekonq 2.3.0 release, a lot of crash bugs that can be fixed just upgrading from QtWebKit 2.3.0 to QtWebKit 2.3.1.
About our features, we have in this release, the following fixes:

a nice speed up on history page construction

IconManager code review, fixing some sites showing the wrong favicon

Let private popus open in private mode

Fix behavious on unloaded sites (show url && reload with F5)

Fix on save zoom settings, at least using buttons and shortcuts. Someone reported it is not working well yet using mouse wheel. It will need some more time to investigate. Stay tuned about

Don’t Save Sessions When Closing Tabs from Logout. This leaded rekonq thinking people was correctly closing browser on session close.

Fix UNICODE symbols shown in the urlbar

We had also some technical code reviews: the usual things programmers like a lot while users never notice :)
The most “notable” one let us to move from “about:” to “rekonq:” protocol for our special pages.
Here it is, rekonq bugfixing release is ready for you. Restarting working on extension support…

This tiny video shows the actual state of extension support:
– we can manage chrome extensions (I just copied examples from here): we can recognize unpacked extensions, install, enable/disable. (oops.. uninstall/delete missing. Adding next days..)
– we can interpret (a bit) the version 2 manifest.json inside
– we can manage browse actions
– we can manage page actions
– we can open popups

So, the first easy step is done. Now what to really say we are supporting chrome extensions? Here is my todo list:
– support chrome object and (a subset of) its API (very long task)
– support the callback mechanism (really hard, this is the trick missing to say we’ll reach one day our goal)
– implement a way to retrieve extensions (support chrome extensions site? seems problematic. Add a ghns layer? Should do the trick. Probably…)
– ehm… port/implement extensions ;)

Here we are, finally ready for the 2.3.0 release. After the 2.2 one we targeted some things to fix and features to implement. We now are in the “almost done” level, meaning that quite all things have been done and that the code push is (hopefully) release level.
So, what’s new in rekonq 2.3.0? Here is the “shopping list”:

– bookmarks && history panels, given all the requests about this feature return, it has been implemented in rekonq 2.x fashion:

– open url as webapp option. This “easy” feature has to be inserted in a wider view. So, please wait for my next post about it to.

– session saving (load/save/rename sessions). As you guessed, you can now decide to save a session for future use, rename it and load when you prefer. Moreover, you can decide to start rekonq showing the session dialog, loading one of the saved sessions.

– some work on respecting one more of the thousand millions kde “wide” settings.

– urlbar look change (not finished). SSL icon on the left as major browsers. coloring url text (yet) missing. We have problems when the urlbar is full and text start to “scroll” on the left. And I’d really like to have an “easier” widget here, allowing rich (colored) text, instead of pixel perfect subpainting.

– Favorites (fast) management, the “opera” way (bye bye “love” icon). Just click on the star icon to set bookmarks and/or favorites.

– appmenu-qt support. Just a missing dbus registration from the rekonq window. Easy to do (2 loc), hard to understand.